Various forms of media sessions may exist in a communication network. For example, a media session may support conferencing (e.g., with multiple speakers or presenters), content streaming (e.g., from a single source to an audience), fax communications, application sharing, and the like. Such a session may convey media of a particular type, such as audio or video, or, alternatively, be a multimedia session that conveys multiple forms of media at the same time (e.g., a video conference with audio, etc.).
Quality of Experience (QoE) is of utmost importance in real-time communications such as media sessions. For example, network congestion can lead to an increase in jitter and/or dropped packets, thereby causing a video stream to appear choppy or frozen to an end user. To ensure an acceptable QoE for a media session, the devices involved in the session may use explicit feedback from the network. Notably, the devices may adjust one or more parameters of the media session based on the network feedback, to help minimize congestion and other events that reduce the QoE of the session.
Ensuring QoE of a media session is relatively straightforward when each endpoint of the media session is able to receive explicit feedback from the network. For example, if both endpoint devices support the same feedback mechanism, each device can adjust its media bitrate, accordingly. However, situations may also arise in which neither or only one of the endpoints supports the feedback mechanism.